Unholy Dimensions

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “Let me go,” Gabrielle whispered in a ghostly little voice. “Please don’t hurt me, Dianna.'”

  Dianna sat up a bit, looking distressed. “I wouldn’t hurt you, my darling girl. I love you! Please don’t think that...”

  “I have to go now. I have to go...”

  “Please don’t, baby. Please stay with me. I love you. More than Smith and the other one. You’ll be my favorite servant. And you will win the favor of my master, for in serving me you shall be serving him...”

  “I can’t.” Tears coursed down Gabrielle’s cheeks. “I can’t.”

  Dianna slumped in her wheelchair again, sadness pulling at her hollow features. “You could come dream with me. There are such places I could show you.”

  “I just can’t, Dianna. Please understand.”

  “I understand,” the older woman mumbled, barely audible, and her head lowered. Her chin touched her chest. Her eyelids began to flutter. “You had better go, then.”

  “Dianna!” Gabrielle now found the strength to scramble to her feet, jolted by alarm. “Don’t go back there! Please stay here! It’s not your world!”

  “That’s...why...I want...to go,” murmured Dianna Wallace, like a somnambulist. And then her eyes closed.

  “Dianna!” Gabrielle cried out, approaching the desk.

  From both the stone containers, the formless spawn reared up. Gabrielle could make no sense of what she saw, only that they reached the ceiling, even spread across it, and that their many limbs and pseudopods had blossomed in the air like some explosion of raw living matter. Some of these limbs were snaking, ropy tendrils, others like thrashing flippers, some frilly like the bodies of sea worms, others barbed with cruel spurs.

  The display sent Gabrielle twirling on her heel and bolting for the door. She nearly fell as her foot snagged Smith’s pooled clothing, but caught herself. She heard the many limbs rushing at her through the air...and as she dove through the threshold, the reaching arms slammed the door closed behind her.

  She heard it lock.

  Gabrielle forced herself to pack all her belongings before fleeing the house of Dianna and Kevin Wallace, made sure to leave no trace of her presence there. At any moment she expected to turn and see Smith standing behind her. Or just as bad, Dianna with her mad, acolyte’s gaze. But she was able to collect her things and leave the house without harm.

  In the city, the next morning, she paid a homeless man twenty dollars to call the police and tell them he thought they should go look in on a crippled woman named Dianna Wallace.

  In the paper the morning after that, Gabrielle read about what the police found there.

  The noted archaeologist/anthropologist/author Dianna Wallace had been found dead in her study, slumped across her desk. She had suffered a killing stroke, the article reported. There had been an autopsy, since the husband Kevin Wallace had not yet been located and there was men’s clothing discarded in the room, but foul play had been ruled out.

  A former housekeeper, Rita Molina, had been interviewed and said that Mrs. Wallace often napped in her wheelchair between her long hours of study, and so it was possible the woman had died peacefully in her sleep.

  The article went on to describe the impressive collection of artifacts in the house...but made no mention of any black fluid residing in twin containers in the study. Though Gabrielle could never be sure, she guessed that the formless servitors of the Dreaming One had left this waking plane in the same manner they had entered it, by stowing away inside the body of Dianna Wallace...and thus, within her astral self.

  For weeks after she had fled the Wallace house, Gabrielle slept fitfully, in short restless naps, and only in the day with sunlight streaming into her apartment, with the TV on and babbling for mindless comfort. And even still, she dreamed.

  Sometimes she thought she saw Kevin in her dreams. But he was tangled in a writhing, living nest, half submerged in a slime of black protoplasm, reaching for her, screaming.

  And she thought she saw Smith standing in a strange sort of graveyard which she found herself walking through, barefoot, her nightgown billowing behind her. He kept his distance, merely watched her, his eyes black as obsidian.

  She saw alien places, and somehow knew their names. The impossible tower of Koth. Celephais. And the looming, mist-cloaked peaks of Kadath in the Cold Waste.

  And she saw Dianna, with her long hair restored, whipping and snaking in the wind. Dianna walking toward her without her wheelchair, reaching out to Gabrielle to join her. Join her forever in the realm of dream.

  But Gabrielle resisted sleep the best she could, until she was haggard, could barely function, would pass out from sheer exhaustion. But it seemed to work, to break up her link to the portal Dianna had left in her wake. The portal closed up. The strange, beckoning dreams stopped.

  Finally Gabrielle was able to mourn her friend instead of fear her. And even, after a time, envy her the freedom she had found.

  If she was indeed free to explore those remarkable dreamlands...

  ...and not serving the whims of some dark and evil god, who slumbered in the prison of sleep -- Dianna herself a damned soul, herself sentenced to a nightmare from which there was no waking.

  Conglomerate

  SOLID AS A ROCK was the company’s motto, and the company icon rested in the Cathedral-huge foyer of its corporate headquarters. It was displayed atop a circular base, directly in the center of the glossy sea of floor, the first thing one saw when entering the towering edifice of Monumental Life. The elevators were pushed off to the left, the reception desk to the right, like afterthoughts.

  Atop this central pedestal rested a huge globe, tall as a man. It reminded Colin James of those massive stone spheres found scattered throughout the jungles of Costa Rica. Rather than being smoothly shaped from one great rock, however, the sphere seemed to be made from thousands of individual pebbles, cemented closely together. Its outer skin was a dense mosaic of shiny stones like the scales of a vast snake coiled sleeping in a tight ball. The pebbles had the color and metallic polish of hematite.

  Seated behind the reception desk, staring across at the immense ball, James thought that a better symbol of the Monumental Life Insurance Corporation would be one solid rock, like those Costa Rican spheres, but then he supposed the pebbles might represent the people who bought into the Monumental Life policies, all held firmly together in one family. Didn’t go as well with the motto, but then, he was no artist, and he was sure whoever had created that sphere had been paid a pretty penny to design it.

  James let his eyes trail up to the high ceiling of the foyer, three full levels above. No, he was no artist. The ball at least he could understand, but that hanging thing was just ugly and weird. It was like a circus pavilion of translucent material, stretched across the foyer half-way up and held taut by strong hooks. It was colored in irregular patterns of blues and greens, so that with the lights glowing through it, the hanging had the organic look of a titanic butterfly wing. Maybe, with its many arms stretched and hooked to the walls, it looked like the flayed skin of some immense octopus. Sometimes, subtly, the hanging rustled like a sail above James's head.

  The light glowing through the hanging cast a soft blue and green radiance across the sphere, so that sometimes it resembled a mysterious planet hanging in the murk of space – the vastness of space beginning just over the edge of James’s desk. This impression would give James a jolt and then a shudder, as if he had snapped awake after drifting into a hypnotic doze. A dream of vertigo.

  The revolving door that gave access to the lobby began to turn, a treadmill rotating on its side. Its churning seemed to stir the air, and the hanging billowed slightly. The door took several seconds before it revealed its occupant: a middle-aged man with longish blond- gray hair and a thick gray beard. His suit was as shabby as James’s was tailored and free of wrinkles. The visitor took two steps into the foyer and froze there, staring at the globe in the center.

  James watched the man for a few moment
s, waiting for him to orient himself, to look around and see the reception/security desk over here to the right. And at last, the man did look James’s way. But he didn’t turn to approach the desk. Instead, he remained where he was. For several more seconds, at least.

  Then, the visitor reached under his open jacket for something in its lining pocket. He withdrew a can of spray paint. James could tell this when the man began to shake it, and the can made its characteristic clattering sound.

  “May I help you?” James asked curtly, coming out from behind the desk at a determined clip. “Sir? Excuse me – sir!”

  But the man didn’t glance at him again. Instead, he stepped up so close to the ball that he nearly disappeared behind it, out of James’s range of sight. But, James heard the hiss. Smelled the stink of paint.

  When he darted forward, he saw the bearded stranger was vandalizing the Monumental Life icon, spray- painting it with some graffiti. The paint was black, and the man moved his arm with such sure strokes that he might as well be an artist himself, the artist who had made the ball, belatedly signing his name to it.

  James seized the man’s arm, gave it enough of a twist to cause the man’s hand to open and the can to drop. He watched the man’s other hand, lest he draw something else from inside his jacket, like a knife.

  The bearded man whipped his face around and his mouth worked moistly inside that scruff of beard, eyes red-rimmed and insane under the tufts of his brows.

  “Let me do what I have to do, friend...you haven’t got a clue. Not a god-damned clue.”

  “I think you’d better sit down, sir,” James told the man. “I really don’t want to hurt you.”

  “We have to stop them. It’s futile, I’m sure of it, but we have to try, don’t we? We have to at least try.”

  “Come with me, sir.”

  The bearded man didn’t struggle. He looked back at the sphere, and James allowed himself one quick look at it himself. Well, the damage had been done. The stranger had painted some symbol in wide strokes, right across the face of the ball. It appeared to be a star with five points and an eye in the center of that, running with black tears. The pupil of the eye was jagged like an abstracted flame.

  James felt a hand dip inside his own jacket.

  The bearded man slipped James’s hidden 9mm SIG-SAUER out of its holster and from there it was just a few inches higher for it to poke James under the jaw. He felt the front sight tear his skin.

  “Please," he whispered, “don’t.” He let go of the man’s arm.

  The stranger pushed James back with his free hand, and then thumbed off the chunky pistol’s safety, snapped back the slide with a clack.

  “Don't!” James blurted.

  “You’ll be doing the same, if they come,” the stranger told him, aiming the handgun. “You should do the same, if they come.” And with this said, the stranger jammed the gun’s muzzle under his gray scruff of beard and pulled the trigger and blew off the top of his skull. A rain of blood pattered across the glossy floor, James’s glossy shoes and the scaly skin of the vandalized ball. And then the stranger crumpled almost gently to the floor.

  James felt under his jaw, looked at his fingers. A slight smear of blood.

  “Are you all right?” the police- man asked him.

  “Yes,” he muttered. Another policeman drew near.

  “Was your gun’s safety on?”

  “Yes. I saw him move it off with his thumb. He looked like he knew how to use a gun.”

  “Was your holster buckled?”

  “It’s always snapped,” James replied evenly, but without meeting the man’s hard eyes. “He got the strap off fast. Like I say, he seemed to know how to handle a gun.”

  “He didn’t look especially big or strong, Mr. James. You got fifty pounds on this guy, easy. And he had ten years on you, easy. How did he get that gun away from you?”

  “He was high on adrenaline Or drugs.”

  “Drugs, huh? Is that your professional opinion? Were you ever a cop before, Mr. James, or did you just wanna be?”

  James still wouldn’t look at the man’s eyes, or let his voice falter. “No. I was never a cop.” He did look at the first policeman, however. “What was his name? Did he have any ID?”

  “Yes. His name was Richard Penn. That’s pretty much all we know so far.”

  “Richard Penn,” James repeated in a bland tone. '”I’m gonna want to look into his files here at Monumental, see if he had a job here at some time, or a dispute over an insurance claim. He was saying something about, ‘stopping them, somebody’s gotta stop them,’ something like that. He had a grudge of some kind.”

  “Good thing he took it out on himself,” said the second cop, “and that thing,” he nodded at the sphere, “instead of you.”

  James was offered a week off, but declined it. He wanted to find out who the bearded man had been, why he had done what he’d done. It was James’s gun the man had died by. He had no more been able to prevent him from using that than he had stopped him from using the spray can. If I was my boss, he thought as he drove to work the next morning, I’d fire me.

  When he entered the lobby, the great stone ball glared at him accusingly with the black eye that had opened upon its rough hide. But there was a man already here, scrubbing at the vandalism with a brush. The man glanced over his shoulder at James as he came in. The man was short, almost a dwarf, stocky, his white coveralls too large for him and his face troll-like, toad-like, shockingly ugly. His irises were too yellow. He turned back to his scrubbing and James smelled a strong chemical cleaner as he walked to the reception desk.

  “How come maintenance isn’t doing that?” James whispered to Warnes, the third shift guard.

  “Dunno.” Warnes stretched and finished off his coffee. “He had clearance, though. Somebody obviously called him in.”

  James shrugged as he came around behind the desk, and seated himself in front of the computer there. “I’m gonna call the police in a minute and see if they have anything on Penn that would save me from having to research him myself.”

  “He knew his paint, anyway,” Warnes joked grimly, softly, nodding over at the ball. “Quasimodo’s having a helluva time getting it off the globe.”

  The detectives in charge of the investigation didn’t get back to James for several hours, but at last one did. By then, impatient, James had already begun his research. The two men exchanged their findings over the phone.

  James reported, “We don’t have any Richard Penn as a past employee, or as a past customer of Monumental Life at any time.”

  “We checked that end, too,” said the detective, Robart. “He had Trustwell Insurance, through Berg College. He was a professor there up until he left two years ago, and he continued his coverage on his own.”

  “A professor? Of what?”

  “Ancient history. They asked him to leave two years ago because he’d been acting erratic, coming to school drunk. They said he was teaching some really out-there things in class...Chariots of the Gods kind of crap. Didn’t go over well with the dean, although I’m sure it was a lot less boring than the real stuff as far as the kids were concerned.”

  “Had he been seeing a psychiatrist, anything?”

  “Nothing in the way of mental health. Unfortunately. And you may be interested to know he did know how to use a gun; he once had a gun taken away from him and his license to own revoked for threatening somebody with it. Just after he lost his job, in fact. He didn’t do time for it, though.”

  “Who was he threatening? What was it about?”

  “The man he threatened took off before police could reach the scene, but there were witnesses to testify that Penn had brandished his gun in a threatening manner. At the time he babbled some stuff about this man being a, um, cultist of some kind...some kind of Satan worshiper or something. A ‘servitor,’ he called him. We only have a description of the man as being very short, powerfully built, maybe foreign.”

  “Mm,” James grunted. “So...the
re’s no motive for why he came here. Why he painted that thing on our sculpture.”

  “Not yet, unfortunately. We’re trying to pin down family. They seem to be all out in Arizona.”

  “Strange,” James muttered, more to himself than to the tiny holes at his lips. He listened to the whisking scrub, scrub, scrub of the man in the too-large coveralls as he worked to free the globe of its desecration.

  “You might wanna check into the files of all the other Nye Conglomerate companies, to see if he might have had some dealings with another branch of the company,” Robart suggested.

  “What? The what Conglomerate?”

  “Nye. Don’t you know who you work for?”

  “Monumental Life, I thought,” James replied with some slight irritation.

  “Monumental Life is one of the companies Nye owns. Man, Nye owns half this city, and a good chunk of the country. How long have you been working over there?”

  “I’ve been in town and worked for Monumental just four months. I’m security chief, though. I’m surprised I never heard that before.”

  “Well, I’ve lived here all my life, so. But yeah, this foreign guy, Nye, he owns Monumental Life, OO Software, CM Investments...um, oh yeah, and of course all the Pantheon Banks...”

  “That’s my bank,” James said, his brow furrowed into frowns. Scrub, scrub, scrub. He couldn’t see the squat worker behind the glistening hematite planet.

  “You may have seen Nye over there and never known it. I’ve seen him a few times over the years. Thin guy, always wears expensive black suits. Polite. Quiet. Looks Indian...Arab, maybe. Leave it to the foreigners; own everything in this country.”

  “Wow,” James said, ignoring the last comment. “Funny. Yeah...yeah, I’ll have to look into all of that. Penn might have had a grudge against one of these other companies.”

  “Keep me informed. I’ll be happy to trade with ya. And pal...”

  “Yeah?”